Media Lab Africa

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Namballa Keita: A Soldier and His Village

“Namballa Keita: A Soldier and His Village” is the story of a young visionary, who was determined to recover from the trauma of war by forging a better future for his people. It invites us also to question the dystopian reality of our “independent” nations gripped by a crisis of fanaticisms caused by the demise of the very school that carried the hope of Namballa Keita and his generation.

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Lulu Dube

1931-2016

A Big Tree Has Fallen

Tribute to the late Lulu Dube, daughter of Reverend John L. Dube, co-founder and first President of the African National Congress.

The late wise man from Mali, Amadou Hampaté Bâ, said that in Africa, an old person who dies is a library that burns. This is truly the case of Mrs Lulu Dube, the last surviving child of Reverend John Langalibalele Dube, the founding president of the African National Congress of South Africa and his wife Angeline Khumalo, who died on Thursday, May 26, 2016, at the age of 84. If obviously we cannot do much to prevent the falling of these giant trees of our African savannahs and forests, we can at least build libraries around their memories; that is, as far as I am concerned, to always use their memories as a springboard for teaching both the young and the not-so-young about key moments of our history.

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Media Lab Africa is dedicated to education and to students around the world. Our primary focus is connecting students in small villages in Africa with students in America through technology, art, storytelling and ultimately through face-to-face cultural exchange.

Funds from the sale of our films go directly to support our continuing work in Africa through media literacy, art and storytelling. Please help us continue this valuable work by purchasing one or all of our films.

uKukhumbula uNokutela

On Saturday, August 31, 2013, Nokutela Mdima Dube was welcomed into the pantheon of the first South African liberation heroes, when a gravestone was officially unveiled for her, after she had suffered for almost a century the indignity of total oblivion in an unmarked grave in Johannesburg.

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Art in Nana Kenieba

This is a student driven art and design project focused on creating “super murals” on the exterior of the buildings at the Namballa Keita School in the Malian village of Nana Keniba.

NOW IN PRODUCTION!

At the height of the Cold War America was trying to win the hearts and minds of people around the world by giving stuff away. In the 1960s America gave a small village in Mali the gift of suburbia. More accurately they came up with an “experimental” project to replace traditional adobe and thatched-roofed huts with buildings that looked more like the typical American styled homes, although admittedly very stripped down, barebones versions of those homes. And thus begins a comedy of errors and miscalculations all taking place in the small village of Djoliba.

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